As a consequence of the Local Government Act, 1972, the North Riding of Yorkshire was actually abolished by the Conservative administration of the time (why, one might ask, do they call themselves “Conservatives”?), and this enactment came into force, appropriately, on All Fools’ Day, 1974. This book, sensibly, sticks to the old boundaries, as they have historical, ecclesiastical, and other resonances that regrettably appear to be of no interest to the contemporary breed of politician.  

The North Riding embraces some glorious inland landscapes, the finest of which can be enjoyed in Wensleydale and Swaledale, and there are some wonderful things to be seen on the North Sea coast, but this book is mostly about buildings and the built environment generally, so it is those aspects with which this review is mostly concerned.

There are astonishing early structures, such as the three Neolithic Thornborough henges, set about half a mile apart on a plateau above the River Ure near West Tanfield, and aligned on a North-West/South-East axis, and numerous elaborately carved objects, such as the tenth-century St Thomas Cross and hogback tombstones, Brompton-in Allertonshire, and the remains of late eighth- and early ninth-century cross-shafts at Cundall and Masham. Some spectacular castle remains can be enjoyed at Richmond, Middleham, and especially at Castle Bolton, a fourteenth-century structure with four mighty corner towers dominating part of Wensleydale. But even more enjoyable are the very considerable monastic ruins, especially at Rievaulx, established from Clairvaux (Clara Vallis) in 1132 in the Arcadian Ryedale (Rye Vallis = Rievaulx), so a very substantial foundation, where the superior qualities of the thirteenth-century architecture testify to its wealth and importance. Apart from Fountains in the West Riding, there is more left standing above ground to enjoy at Rievaulx  than at any other Cistercian abbey in England. Also wondrous, though this time immensely dramatic, are the fragments of Whitby Abbey, perched high on their bare, windswept hill above the sea, and of Byland Abbey, set in a valley much wider than that of Ryedale, the twelfth-century west wall of the church an unforgettable image.

Among other ecclesiastical buildings may be mentioned the late fifteenth-century St Mary’s, Thirsk, the richest late-mediæval church in all the North Riding: the amazing vaulted eleventh-century crypt at St Mary’s, Lastingham (the church over it was tactfully restored by J. L. Pearson in 1879); St Mary’s, Whitby, with its unique, joyful jumble of mediæval and Georgian fabric, not least the unusual survival of galleries and box-pews, mercifully ungutted by Victorian zealots, and all sensitively restored under W.D. Caröe in 1905; the very grand church of St James, Baldersby St James (1856-8), by William Butterfield; the exquisite little Christ Church, Appleton-le-Moors (1863-5), by Pearson; the delightful and tiny St Mary Magdalene, East Moors (1881-2), by George Gilbert “Middle” Scott and Temple Moore (unaccountably not illustrated here); and the stupendously noble St Martin’s, Albion Road, Scarborough (1861-2 and later), by G. F. Bodley, with its complete decorative scheme by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., including the lovely pulpit, designed by Ford Madox Brown and Morris, with paintings by George Campfield. St Martin’s is truly breathtaking in its heroic scale, richness, and architectural quality. There are many more churches worthy of a visit in the North Riding, but there is insufficient room here to even list them.

The country houses of the North Riding are many and varied, but the grandest is undoubtedly the Baroque Castle Howard, by John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor (1699-1737), the Great Hall of which is a knockout. The grounds, too, are rewarding, enhanced as they are with several very fine buildings that include the Temple of the Four Winds (with its four tetrastyle porticoes), of c.1723-8, by Vanbrugh, the mighty drum of the Roman Doric Mausoleum (1728-42) by Hawksmoor and Daniel Garrett, and other structures, including the Carrmire Gate (1726, by Hawksmoor), the Pyramid Gate (1719 and 1756, by Vanbrugh and Sir Thomas Robinson), the Obelisk (1714, by Vanbrugh), the Pyramid (1728, by Hawksmoor), and other embellishments, so the entire ensemble should not be missed. 

Among other rather wonderful garden buildings elsewhere are the Gothick temple at Aske Hall (1740) by William Kent and Daniel Garrett, and the Culloden Tower (again Gothick), Richmond (1746), by Garrett: the latter building celebrated the Jacobite defeat, so was a political statement with a punch. Gothick reappears at the Home Farm, Hartforth (2009), by Digby Harris, based on an earlier design by Francis Johnson of Bridlington: it is a rather wonderful conceit, Classical on one side, and Gothick on the other (so reminiscent of that splendid house in County Down, Castle Ward [1760-73], with one front Palladian and the other Gothick, facing Strangford Lough). 

The North Riding possesses many charming survivals, apart from monastic ruins and the truly extraordinary interior of the parish church at Whitby. They include the Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond (1788), and an exotic bottle-window in Grape Lane, Whitby, of the middle of the eighteenth century. The latter consists of a glazed opening rising four floors, and incorporates the entrance-door with fanlight over it: behind the window can be seen elegant balustrades, and this rather beautiful feature is so called because the opening in the brickwork in which the window is set resembles the shape of a bottle. 

There are also some towns with pleasing centres to be found: one is Yarm, with its very wide High Street held between curving sides of mostly late eighteenth-century houses, marred by some crassly offensive twentieth-century insertions (there is a lovely polychrome brick Roman Catholic church, under the unusual patronage of Sts Mary and Romuald, erected in 1860 to designs by Hadfield & Goldie at one end of the town); another is Stokesley, which has two greens divided by a market-place, and although it has no outstanding individual buildings, is perhaps the most attractive of the small towns in the entire County; and there is Masham, with its huge Market Square, differing from the linear centres of other North Riding market-towns. 

Of other settlements, the formal estate village consisting of houses strung out on either side of an elongated green at East Witton, the whole laid out for Thomas Brudenell-Bruce, 1st Earl of Ailesbury, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is perhaps the most pleasing, but although the substantial Gothic Revival church there (1809-12 by H.H. Seward) is mentioned, as well as the former Vicarage, the book omits to mention one of the most important groups of buildings in the village, the inn with its former stables, etc.: the inn-sign alludes to the crest of the Brudenell-Bruces in the Lion rampant Azure, so that handsome establishment’s name is the Blue Lion. Another pleasant village street, which rises westwards to the church of St Michael (where the Living was once held [1760-8] by Laurence Sterne), can be found at Coxwold. 

Middlesborough, the biggest town in the North Riding, developed because of the extension of the Stockton to Darlington Railway in 1830, largely through the efforts of the Quaker industrialist, Joseph Pease, who saw the possibilities of the place as a port for coal, and caused the town to be planned by Richard Otley, Surveyor to the Railway Company. In 1850 iron ore was discovered in the Cleveland Hills, and a German from Mecklenburg, H.W.F. Bolckow, and a Welshman, John Vaughan, who had built up an iron foundry and rolling-mill at Middlesborough, started a process by which rapid development unparalleled elsewhere in England took place, and by 1900 Teesside was producing over a quarter of the nation’s steel. However, the collapse of steelmaking,  the closure of the shipyards, and the demise of ICI in 2006 has resulted in an economic decline that is only too painfully visible. Nevertheless, the town retains some remarkable work, including some impressive churches (including St Columba [1900-2], by Temple Moore, and St John the Evangelist [1863-5], by John Norton, with later additions by Alexander & Henman and C.G Hare), but the fine Public Library (1910-12—by Sir Edwin Cooper), Webb House (1883-91—the only surviving commercial building by Philip Webb), and the stunning Transporter Bridge spanning the Tees (1909-11—designed by the Cleveland Bridge & Engineering Company and erected by Sir William Arrol & Co.), are distinguished, by any standards, and are decently illustrated too.

In the earliest manifestation of North Riding, the rather dismally indistinct black-and-white photographs attempted to show both Stokesley and Yarm, but this new, vastly enlarged edition perversely shows neither, yet illustrates some buildings (plates 123, 126-8, and 132) which hardly deserve images at all. However, the gorgeous screen in St Andrew’s church, Aysgarth (c.1506), presumably once a Rood-screen, and possibly rescued from somewhere else, possibly the Cistercian Abbey at Jervaulx, is illustrated, as is the grand Crathorne Hall (1903-9), by the distinguished London firm of Ernest George & Yeates. And mention of Aysgarth prompts the thought that perhaps the famous Falls, by which the River Ure cascades down a series of terraces or shelves, might have deserved a photograph: another series of cascades, though less spectacular than at Aysgarth, can be found at Bainbridge.

So although there are some rather questionable choices of illustration and some very odd omissions, the book is a long-overdue addition to the Yorkshire volumes, and is welcomed for that.